Saturday, December 20, 2014

I ran across Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read recently while
doing the research for my blog post on Best Books for 2014. Always interested
in the nature of the reading process, I ordered it, especially when I saw the
subtitle was A Phenomenology, for I
have long been interested in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; furthermore, I
could not see how anyone writing a popular book would risk subtitling it A Phenomenology. And that's what What We See When We Read is–a
popular book intended for a general audience.

Written by the associate art director at
Alfred A. Knopf and art director of Pantheon Books, this is an entertaining
graphic treatment of concepts that have been around a long time among
philosophers and literary theorists, but which may not be familiar to the
general reader, although any reader may find the ideas compelling, and cleverly
presented.

The range of Mendelsund's references can be
seen in the first two headnote quotations—one from Wittgenstein—"A
proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it"--and the other from
Agatha Christie about her first imagined image of Hercule Poirot—that he was
like something on the stage. Although the range of cites is fairly extensive,
there are no footnotes and no list of sources at the end—just as well, for the
general reader will probably not want to follow up on the originators of these
ideas. With lots and lots of graphics—more
graphics than text really—it is a book to enjoy for itself. I read it in about three hours, but you can
spend more time just flipping through the images.

Mendelsund confronts his basic question—what
do we see when we read—immediately in the book by challenging us to describe
Anna Karenina. He concludes that we cannot do this—that we will come up with a
body type or a vague image, for characters in fiction are not so much physical
beings as they are choreographic figures who have only those few features that
"signify" something. The
implication of this—that characters are ciphers or sets of rules and that narratives
are made richer by omission—is particularly relevant to the short
story—although Mendelsund, as might be expected, primarily uses novels for his
illustrations.

Indeed, I find that much of what Mendelsund
says about narrative is directly applicable to the short story because—no surprise
to my readers—I think the short story is the primal mode of narrative—the mode
closest to a basic human need and impulse to tell stories and respond to
them. I also think, of course, that the
short story is the most "artistic" narrative form; consequently, what
Mendelsund says about "artistic" narrative is directly applicable to
the short story.

Mendelsund reminds us that when we read we
withdraw from the phenomenal world, turning our attention inward. Rather than looking through a clear glass to
some world outside, we look at the book as if it were a mirror and we are
looking inward. I won't clutter up my
comments here by referring the reader to the origins of Mendelsund's remarks,
but one of the philosophic sources of this one is Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
notes that when we read we have the choke of looking through a glass or looking
at the glass itself to see what it reflects. I have always argued that the
short story is more a matter of form than content. James Lasdun's remark, which I quoted in my
blog on Hilary Mantel, emphasizes this also.

Mendelsund says that the openings of such
novels as To the Lighthouse and Moby Dick are confusing to us because we
have not been given enough information to begin processing the narrative,
"But we are used to such confusion.
All books open in doubt and dislocation." True enough, which is one of the reasons
folks don't like short stories, for they don't give us enough time to get
oriented to the language-created world we have entered.

Mendelsund says words are like musical
notes in that the significance of a word is contingent on the words that
surround it. Furthermore, in order to make sense of a book's words and phrases,
he says we must think ahead, anticipate. "Reading is not a sequence of
experienced 'now's…Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious
moment—and in the performative reading moment as well." He cites
Merleau-Ponty here: "With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor
undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already
it is sinking away below the level of presents..." One of the aspects of
Alice Munro's stories that makes them so compelling to read is her manipulation
of time to remind us that our reading experience is not a "sequence"
of nows. In the past, I have commented
at some length on the short story's being structured like music, dependent more
on rhythm and form than on content.

"All good books are, at heart,
mysteries," says Mendelsund. Indeed, I have argued in other places that
the short story focuses on mystery. For
the most provocative considerations of this aspect of the form, see Flanner
O'Connor's Mystery and Manners.

Writers not only tell us stories, they tell
us how to read stories; when we read we put together a set of rules—a method
for reading this particular work, a manner of thinking about this particular
work. "The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine,
and how much." One of the problem readers have with reading short stories
is trying to figure out the rules for reading the short story as a form, and
this particular short story they are reading before the short story has
ended. That's why short stories have to
be read more than once.

Mendelsund uses the detective mystery as
the model for this process, with the characters as archetypes acting like players
on a game board. Characters are mostly seen in action, Mendelsund reminds us,
not as physical entities. I have posted earlier on why I think the short story
began in America with the detective story by Edgar Allan Poe and how the short
story is like a detective story in its structure and sense of mystery and
order.

The writer takes something from its context
in the real world, where it exists in a state of flux, and holds it fast in language,
making it an immobile wave, no longer fluid. Yes, indeed, this is what poetry does, of
course. And the short story is closer to poetry than it is to the novel.

When we examine something the author has
immobilized through the lens he has given us, what we observe is not so much
the thing itself, but the tools the work has made us construct in order to
observe the thing. When we praise finely observed prose, we praise the efficacy
of the ideas and the beauty of the equipment both at once. The inability to separate the language and
the content in a short story is what makes the form so challenging—that is, if
one is not sensitive to the language.

Mendelsund quotes Italo Calvino, whose
collection The Uses of Literature
have just started rereading as a Christmas present to myself: "For me, the main thing in a narrative
is…the order of things…the pattern; the symmetry; the network of images deposited
around it…" No comment necessary; see
everything I have ever said about the short story.

Mendelsund speaks of the book as a sort of
musical score which we perform and attend the performance at once. See above on
short story and music.

When we read we co-create. "We would rather have sketches than
verisimilitude—because the sketches, at least, are ours. And yet, readers still
contend that they want to 'lose themselves' in a story." Good books incite
us to fill in an author's suggestions in a co-creative act. "Some things
we do not wish to be shown." Mendelsund cites the familiar example of
Kafka's insisting to his publisher not to provide a likeness of his famous dung
beetle on the cover of "Metamorphosis." Very nice: Who the hell wants verisimilitude? If I
wanted reality, I would go out in the world.
And I don't want to lose myself in a work; I want to be aware of what
the story is doing.

Mendelsund says we do not refer to Hamlet
as a character, but rather as a role, one who is meant to be played. I used to
argue with my students, to no avail, that Hamlet's famous inability to act was
because he was aware that he was always acting.

Mendelsund quotes Moses Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed: "There is
no real unity without incorporeality." That which exists in time has nothing
to do with the sacred, don't you think? And unity has nothing to do with the
seemingly real.

Mendelsund's central point is that we do
not have pictures in our minds when we read; rather, we read for the
intermingling of abstract relationships, which may sound like an unenjoyable
experience, but in truth is what happens when we listen to music. "This
relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in
art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of
elements." Yes, indeed. Please read that quote again; then read a
great short story.

"When I'm reading a novel or story,
the contents—places, people, things—of the drama recede and are supplanted by significance. The vision of a flowerpot, say, is replaced
by my readerly calculation of the meaning and importance of this flowerpot. We
are ever gauging these significances in texts, and much of what we 'see' when
we read is this 'significance.'"
The problem many readers have with short stories is that they just read
for the content and not the meaning of the content.

Mendelsund quotes a passage from Wharton's House of Mirth" in which a man
thinks of the hair and eye lashes of a young woman he is walking with, but it
is not the physical image we sense, rather a "rhythm" of the words that
convey the young man's elation. In other
words, it is the rhythm of the language we feel, not the merely physical
object.

He quotes Beckett on Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: "His writing is
not about something; it is that something itself." No comment necessary.

"Writers reduce when they write, and
readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace,
emblemize. Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable
goal. So we reduce… Picturing stories is
making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning." See Levis
Strauss on reduction as an aesthetic act.

"Maybe the reading imagination is a
fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and
are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a
metaphysical union of reader and author.
Perhaps the author taps the universal and becomes a medium for it."

In some way, Mendelsund says, readers are
"see-ers" and the reading experience derives from the tradition of
visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of
religious or mystical epiphany." He asks whether the visions of literature
are like religious epiphanies or Platonic verities, more real than phenomenal
reality. "Do they point toward some deeper manner of authenticity? (Or: by
mimicking the real world, do they point toward its inauthenticity."

Flannery O'Connor would have loved these two paragraphs. Alice Munro would also. As would have Chekhov. And, believe it or not, so would have James
Joyce. Why else would he call his short stories epiphanies? This is why I titled my recent book on the short story I Am Your Brother.

Fascinating read. Got me thinking about the art of writing and the short story in a way I don't think I ever have before. The comparison between words and music notes, in particular, struck a chord with me...

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."